They all fall down

Yes, eventually they will all be gone: these old farmhouses are doomed. Sometimes you can tell where a house used to be – the elms or cedars may be still alive or not yet so dead that they’ve fallen over.

Other times, though, the house will disappear without a trace. That happened to two houses on my drive to work (if I take the route that goes on a farm road). When I started this job two years ago, there were a pair of houses at a crossroads; one house was already vacant, and I watched the broken window glass shredding the curtains.

The other one had inhabitants. Sometimes in the winter I could see a blue glow inside, like the people who lived there were watching television. One day, a car from a home health agency passed me on the road; it was going very fast. Then I saw it parked at the house, on the hard-packed dirt yard at an angle like they’d parked in a hurry. It was only a few months after that when the house started to take on the look of a vacant place – an unlatched screen door banging in the wind, broken stuff piling up in front, no more home health cars parked there. And no television-glow from inside.

One of the houses got pushed over by a yellow bulldozer, and the pieces hauled away. In a matter of two days, it was like it had never even been there at all. The other one, the home-health house, was eventually vacant and then got pushed down and burned. The smoldering pieces were shoved into a hole which smoked for a few days. Then it all got covered over with dirt.

Now that I’ve written all this down, it’s starting to seem like maybe I have an obsession with these old places. And maybe I do. I could certainly obsess over worse things.

But anyway, one of these days, my travels will take me on this particular road, and later, when I get up to the main highway, maybe I’ll remember that I didn’t see this old place a few miles back, leaning into the wind.